Health and Human Service secretary Kathleen Sebelius claimed under oath today that the federal government’s largely dysfunctional Healthcare.gov website has never crashed, even though the site was down as she testified.

“I would suggest the website has never crashed,” Sebelius said during Wednesday’s House Commerce and Energy Committee hearing. “It is functional, but at a very slow speed and very low reliability, and has continued to function.”

The distinction means that a tiny fraction of people have been able to successfully use the website. It’s a little like saying that 99% of Washington burnt down, not 100%.

Healthcare.gov doesn’t work… but it didn’t crash. At least on their backend. You just can’t use it. It’s not a dead website. It’s just pining for the fjords.

More hairsplitting came when asked about people losing their health insurance plans.

Sebelius disputed contentions that people are losing health insurance under the new law. If people get notices of cancellation because their existing insurance was not grandfathered in and does not meet minimum standards, “it’s the law that they must get another plan,” Sebelius said. “Continuing coverage is part of the law, and that wasn’t the case in the past.”

They’re not losing their health insurance, in the sense that it’s illegal for them not to have health insurance. They’re losing their good and affordable health insurance and being forced to pay far more for bad high deductible ObamaCare insurance… that does cover drug abuse, mental problems and maternity for everyone… including 59 year old women.

Sebelius’ equivocation reminds me of Anatole France’s “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.”

Nobody loses health insurance. They just lose health insurance that they can afford to pay for.

Sebelius, trying to explain a nightmare of non-functioning websites and canceled insurance policies, argued that the free market had to go. “This market has always been the Wild West,” she said. “The individual insurance market was dysfunctional.”